Comment by reificator
8 years ago
I don't work for Microsoft, but my guess would be in order to securely access a shell. (Remotely, but srsh doesn't roll off the tongue)
Honestly though, I'm more interested in an SSH server for Windows. I haven't tried for many years, but last time I did, getting something more secure than telnet was a massive pain.
I'm using this in production on a Windows Server 2016
https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/wiki/Install-Win...
It works but I never managed to connect to it using public/private keys, only username and password.
Luckily I don't have to type them:
sshpass -f password.txt user@windows.host "powershell Stop-Computer"
It would be great if at least Windows Server came with a built in ssh server.
Maybe this is because key auth requires domain\username@host (doesn't resolve the domain automagically)?
https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/issues/420#issue...
Why? If you're on Windows and managing Windows, you just use WinRM for a PowerShell session. Even then, though, most of the tools support RPC so your tools already communicate with remote systems.
"No SSH" doesn't mean "no remote management capability." SSH hasn't been available because you don't need it unless you need to manage a Linux system or a network device. The only reason it's being introduced now is because people like to use git, and git fucking sucks if you're not in a POSIX environment.
At the time I wanted to manage my only Windows box remotely, and from mobile devices that had nothing but ssh and vnc. (SSH being the clear winner there.)
I run Cygwin sshd - I wouldn't expose it to the internet, but have no qualms about using it after hopping through a Linux box.
Yeah. My memory is fuzzy... I think I got to that step, but I couldn't figure out how to have it start with the machine without a bunch of hoops and caveats. But that was many years ago and I could be mixing it up with something else.
It's very simple these days - there's a script, `ssh-host-config`, which asks a number of questions (like whether you want user isolation for the service or not) and installs the service as native Windows service (using cygrunsrv).